The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod"

Front matter

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”

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—Wituam’F. HALLoRAN

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Chapter Twenty: 1900 11 Chapter Twenty-One: 1901 67 Chapter Twenty-Two: 1902 135 Chapter Twenty-Three: 1903 193 Chapter Twenty-Four: 1904 251 Chapter Twenty-Five: 1905 313 Afterword 397 Appendix 1 405 Appendix 2 409 Endnotes 415

List of Illustrations 467

To the memory of Noel and Rosemarie Sharp and

Introduction

ABBREVIATIONS

Letters to Yeats Letters to W. B. Yeats, Vols. I and II, ed. Richard Finnernan, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)

E. A.S. Elizabeth A. Sharp

ECS. Edmund Clarence Stedman

E. W. R. Edith Wingate Rinder

F. M. Fiona Macleod

W.S. William Sharp

Memoir William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir, compiled by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp (New York: Duffield & Co., 1910)

Middle Years Katherine Tynan Hinkson, The Middle Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917)

Romantic "90s Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926)

These abbreviations describe the form of the original letter:

AD autograph draft

ALS autograph signed letter ACS autograph lettercard signed APS autograph postcard signed TL typed letter

TLS typed letter signed

Chapter Twenty

On 3 January 1900, Sharp wrote a letter to Nellie Allen from Chorleywood and enclosed a copy of the poem he had written and delivered at the December meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club. In the poem he alluded to her husband, and in his preliminary remarks he called Grant Allen “a fine writer and true-hearted man” whose death was a loss to his many friends and to the club. Both Sharps looked forward to seeing Nellie again as soon as she vacated The Croft in Hindhead and settled in London. On January 8, he wrote a long letter to Edith Lyttelton who had come under the spell of the Fiona writings. It demonstrates his use of Fiona to foster a friendship with a member of the aristocracy, herself an aspiring writer. He was sorry to hear she had been ill through much of the fall. He had also been ill, he confided, and was determined not “to spend another midwinter in this damp & sunless climate.” He asked if she had written anything lately and declared that Fiona, having sampled her earlier work, felt assured she “could, and probably some day soon would, write a notable book.” Fiona’s new book, The Divine Adventure, would be published in March by Chapman & Hall. The book’s title was also the title of its long titular essay which had appeared in the recent November and December issues of Chapman & Hall’s Fortnightly Review. The book, he wrote, will be “personal” and “autobiographical,” unlike anything Fiona has produced. As for William Sharp, he was “at work every available hour on a commissioned ‘History of the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century’ — a kind of synthesis, or coup d'oeil perhaps, of the dominating features and interrelated developments of modern art.” He concluded by asking Mrs. Lyttelton to join him the following

Monday for tea and a chat at his club, the Grosvenor Club, or if she preferred, he could come to her.

In these letters of early January Sharp seemed quite happy, but his cheerfulness soon turned to gloom. During the warm and sunny fall he enjoyed life in Chorleywood, but as winter set in he began to tire of country life and rue the travel in and out of London in foul weather. In early February, he had to tell Theodore Watts-Dunton he could not repay the loan of £25 he had received in November. His letter of February 9 casts a revealing light on both the state of his health and the medical issues people faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

I know you will be sorry to hear that since Christmas I have had a bad time of it. First, I got influenza again, with pneumonic complication — then an inflammatory condition of the veins was set up — & thro’ that & an accident on the railway I started a bad varicose vein, badly strained, & constantly threatening a clot (phlebitis) — laming me as though I had the gout! — & keeping me to the house for weeks. Then a very painful & prostrating meningeal neuralgia set in — partly from overstrain of work & financial straits etc. Still, all might have gone well, had not I gone one day (under great stress of agony) to a dentist to be sure there was nothing the matter with my teeth. He was a faddist, & incompetent — & having found all absolutely sound said he wd. take out 5 sound teeth then & there (& without gas!) as that would cure me! I was weak enough to be persuaded of urgency — but after the second sound tooth had been literally torn out (for my teeth are very sound & strong) I fainted & he could do no more. It now turns out he was wholly wrong as to this — & I have lost two sound molars & have my neuralgia still, only worse! The nervous shock proved so bad for me that my wife, & the doctor, became seriously perturbed. The upshot was that a few days ago I was ordered away for a month to recruit by the sea — & would have gone 2 days ago but for a sudden painful attack of lumbago.

One can only wonder how people endured such a litany of pain. Watts-Dunton had asked Sharp to make some revisions to the sonnets he contributed to The Sonnets of the Nineteenth Century which Sharp edited for the Walter Scott publishing company in 1886. He began this letter by assuring Watts-Dunton he would ask someone at the firm to make the “rectifications” in the volume’s next edition. Worried as he was about money, he went on to say the book had been through several editions, sold nearly 100,000 copies, and was about to undergo another edition. Yet he had received only £10 for editing it and benefited not at

Chapter Twenty 13 all from the substantial royalties. He planned to go into London the next day and try to raise enough money to take Elizbeth, who was “down with bronchitis,” to “recruit by the sea.” His bank or other friends came through, and they managed to escape for a month to Broadstair on the southern coast.

Shortly after returning to Chorleywood in early March, Sharp went to Edinburgh to visit his mother and sister for two days on “family business.” On March 15, he wrote to William Blackwood proposing an article for Blackwood’s Magazine on “Recent French Art” — he planned to visit Paris for the Salon which would open on April 2 — or an article on Breton poets since he planned to go on to Brittany from Paris. He had called at Blackwood’s Edinburgh office, but he was not there, and he would not have the pleasure of meeting him since he planned to return to London the next morning.

As it turned out, Sharp fell ill and instead of returning as planned on March 16, he stayed until Monday the 26" when, back in Chorleywood, he wrote a note to his friend Stanley Little: “Just returned — but E. still very seedy and at her mother’s. I go there now but shall be back tomorrow and hope to write then or Wedny.” Two days later, he wrote again and began by saying he was months behind with urgent work due to illnesses, his and Elizabeth’s. After recounting the progress of their maladies, he turned to the work he had managed to do. Between January 1 and 21, he wrote 50,000 words for what would become The Progress of Art in the Nineteenth Century. Then he came down with the flu and was unable to continue. He still had 70,000 words to write, but he could not get to it until mid-April. Elizabeth agreed to write an additional 15,000 words about music, and they hoped to have it all done before the end of May. It was commissioned by The Linscott Publishing Company in Toronto and Philadelphia and became Volume Twenty-Two in their gigantic Nineteenth Century Series. It was also published separately in 1902 by W. and R. Chamber, Ltd., in London and Edinburgh.

Little asked Sharp about this work because he had agreed to write another volume for the Linscott series and wondered how much Sharp was being paid. Sharp said he “had special terms, without which it wd. have been wholly impossible to take up the book: and not only special terms, but special conditions of payment.” Unfortunately, he could not share those terms with Little because he was under a pledge of honor, a given promise, not to do so. He also asked Little not to mention his name or what he had told him when dealing with the Linscott firm. Unless specified in a contract, Little was unlikely to get an advance from Linscott so he should just send in his manuscript and hope for royalties. He told Little he was leaving in a few days to review the Salon in Paris and then to spend some time in Brittany. When he returned, he hoped he and Elizabeth could get together with Little and his wife. Meanwhile, “Iona,” the “highly autobiographical” Fiona Macleod essay Sharp wrote in the fall of 1899, appeared in the March and April issues of The Fortnightly Review.

When he returned from France in mid-April, Sharp began to make arrangements for a performance of a Fiona Macleod play, the only such performance during his lifetime. While visiting Grant Allen in 1897, he met Frederick Whelen, one of Allen’s nephews, who wanted to find a vehicle for producing contemporary art plays. Sharp expressed interest since he was writing a highly symbolic Fiona Macleod play destined, he thought, for the Celtic Theater W. B. Yeats was planning in Dublin. In July 1899, Whelen, encouraged by Sharp and several prominent actors and businessmen, invited several hundred people to attend an organizing meeting for what became the Stage Society. Seventy-five invitees showed up at his house in London’s Red Lion Square. Despite the crowd, Whelen managed to form a seven-member Managing Committee that included Sharp. It was agreed the Society would sponsor several performances of new plays every year. They would take place on Sunday evenings when theaters would otherwise be dark because of the prohibition of public performances on the Sabbath. To circumvent the law and avoid prosecution, the performances would be called meetings of the Society and only members of the society and invited guests would be able to attend.

The performances began in the fall of 1899, and Whelen, with Sharp’s encouragement, scheduled a production of Fiona Macleod’s “The House of Usna” for the fifth meeting of the Society in the Globe Theatre on April 29 1900. Sharp sent a Fiona letter to Whelen dated April 16 in which she gave her permission for the performance and delegated all final revisions and performance details to her “friend and relative Mr. William Sharp.” Her only request had to do with “reserved accommodations.” She asked for two contiguous boxes, one for her

Chapter Twenty 15 friends the Sharps and herself if she was able to “come from Scotland for the occasion.” She wanted to offer the second to George Meredith in case he was able to attend or, if not, to other friends. She requested eight reserved stall seats which she designated for W. L. Courtney, Editor of The Fortnightly; James Knowles Esq., Editor of The Nineteenth Century; W. B. Yeats. Esq.; Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Rhys; The Hon. Alfred & Mrs. A. Lyttelton; and Mr. Percy Bunting, Editor of The Contemporary Review. The tickets were to be given directly to Sharp who would either send them to Fiona or forward them as she directed. The absence of Edith and Frank Rinder from the list of people for whom tickets were to be reserved is curious. I expect it was due to the possibility that Meredith might attend. We recall Sharp had introduced Edith as Fiona Macleod to Meredith who described her as one of the most beautiful women he ever met. It would be more than embarrassing if he saw Edith at the performance and identified her as Fiona, the author of the play. Since Meredith, in the end, was unable to attend, the Rinders may have been among the friends who occupied the second reserved box.

“The House of Usna” was one of three Fiona plays Sharp had been writing with Yeats’ encouragement. On April 29, it shared the bill with two Maeterlinck plays: “The Interior” and “The Death of Tintagiles.” Y. M. Capel composed music for the Sharp play, and it was directed by Granville Barker. According to Elizabeth, one critic said the play had beauty and atmosphere, “two very rare things on the stage, but I did not feel that it quite made a drama, or convince, as a drama should, by the continuous action of inner or outer forces. It was, rather, passion turning upon itself, and with no language buta cry.” Other reviews were more positive. Elizabeth said Sharp “took the greatest interest in the rehearsals, and in the performance. He thoroughly enjoyed the double play as he chatted about Fiona during the intervals unconcerned about the risks of their detecting the real authorship.” The play was printed in The National Review in July 1900 and then in book form by Thomas Mosher in Maine in 1903 (Memoir, pp. 317-18).

By July 1900, the Stage Society was floundering for lack of resources. Sharp and Whelen developed a plan to rescue it which Sharp described ina letter to the actor/manager Frederick Charles Charrington, a fellow member of the Managing Committee. The plan prevailed, Sharp became the Society’s Chairman, and Whelen its Secretarial Manager. The Society went on for forty years and produced more than two hundred plays that would not have succeeded at first in the West End.

For some time, Sharp had used the London address of Lillian Rea rather than that of his sister in Edinburgh as the return address for the Fiona letters. Receiving the letters in London, where he spent most of his time while in Britain, enabled him to draft answers more quickly and send them to Edinburgh for Mary to copy and mail. In a June 1 letter to Grant Richards, Fiona identified Miss Rea as her late agent and typist and said she was away recovering from illness. Fiona was having all her correspondence “sent through a literary friend, whose address heads this letter.” This address (11 Woronsow Road, London) was the home of Edith Rinder who was often conflated in Sharp’s mind with Fiona and who began to provide secretarial assistance for Sharp.

In June 1899, Grant Richards, at Sharp’s suggestion, asked Fiona to assemble and edit a poetry anthology which would be called “The Hour of Beauty.” A year later, a Fiona letter informed Richards she could not promise to have the book done before the New Year. She had been “much of an invalid” since the previous November and unable to do much work. On 20 October 1900, Fiona wrote again to Richards, with the Lillian Rea return address restored, to say she was resting in London for two days before leaving England for Tangiers. She had been seriously ill, and “a southern air” and “absolute rest are imperatively prescribed.” She had to “relinquish[...] all hopes” of finishing The Hour of Beauty before or by Christmas. She wanted to give Richards the option of withdrawing from their agreement or letting it stand indefinitely until her health recovered so she could “take up properly that which can be done only absolutely con amore, and with scrupulous judgment and care.” She wondered, instead, if Richards would like to publish a little volume of her poetry in the spring:

It would be called either For a Little Clan or else The Immortal Hour — the latter being the title of the greater part of the little book, a poetic old world drama, perhaps to be defined as “a symbolist drama” (though I dislike such designations) which is to appear in The Fortnightly Review either in November or December (or in both). The remainder of the book would consist of the few selected poems (all I care to preserve) from a volume of verse published some four or five years ago, From the Hills of Dream, with some new and uncollected poems.

Chapter Twenty 17

A Fiona letter to Richards dated October 31 indicates he decided to defer the anthology until she was able to finish it. He liked her suggestion of a small book of poems which would include “The Immortal Hour.” In her response, Fiona expressed her hope that she would be able to select the poems and send copy for the book “from Marseille or Malta or Algiers (I do not know where yet) by the end of November.” In order to avoid Richards asking to meet Fiona, her October 20 letter informed him she would be in London only two days on her way South. Her October 31 letter is postmarked from Paris on November 13 which means Sharp held it for three weeks to avoid a London postmark and mailed it from Paris on his way south.

In the summer and fall of 1899, Sharp implied to several friends he was experiencing a blurring or a reintegration of the two aspects of his personality and suggested his future writings would reflect a merger of the Fiona voice and the William Sharp voice with the former more prominent in his fiction and poetry and the latter more prominent in his nonfiction. In his 8 January 1900 letter to Edith Lyttelton, Sharp said Fiona Macleod’s The Divine Adventure would be “unlike anything she has done; it would be personal and autobiographical, especially in the essay called ‘Tona’”, parts of which would appear in February and March in The Fortnightly. The periodical’s publisher, Chapman & Hall, would also publish the book containing “Iona” and other essays. When it appeared in May 1900, it carried a longer title derived from its content, The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History, and it went through several editions during the year. In a Fiona letter to John Macleay in early October 1899 (Volume 2), Sharp wrote:

There is a sudden departure from fiction ancient or modern in something of mine that is coming out in the November and December issues of “The Fortnightly Review.” [Volume 72, pp. 879-895 and 1058-1076] I hope you will read “The Divine Adventure,” as it is called — though this spiritual essay is more “remote” i.e. unconventional, and in a sense more “mystical,” than anything I have done. But it is out of my inward life. It is an essential part of a forthcoming book of spiritual and critical essays or studies in the spiritual history of the Gael, to be called “The Reddening of the West.”

The essay improbably personifies the Body, the Will and the Soul and sets them on a journey, “each independently, as three good friends,” to discover the meaning of life: “We had never been at one, though we had shared the same home, and had enjoyed so much in common; but to each, at the same time, had come the great desire of truth, than which there is none greater save that of beauty.” Confusion sets in from the start as the narrator of the journey sees his Body, his Soul, and his Will independently travelling through a Scottish landscape each talking with people they meet along the way. Just who, we wonder, is the observernarrator? What part is left after the departure of Body, Soul and Will? Perhaps the intellect, but that piece of the puzzle seems to merge with the Will or the Mind as the journey proceeds. It is a decided relief at the end to find the narrator having learned:

there is no absolute Truth, no absolute Beauty, even for the Soul. It may be that in the Divine Forges we shall be so moulded as to have perfect vision. Meanwhile only that Truth is deepest, that beauty highest which is seen, not by the Soul only, or by the Mind, or by the Body, but all three as one. Let each be perfect in kind and perfect in unity. This is the signal meaning of the mystery.

If that is the conclusion, was the thirty-four-page journey worth the author’s effort and the reader’s patience? It must have been, since the book went through several editions. Its success shines a bright light on the efforts of many in 1900 to come to terms with the previous century’s scientific discoveries. With its masculine narrator and the masculine nature of his dissected parts, the essay comes out of the “inward life” of William Sharp, and Fiona Macleod, the nominal author, is nowhere to be heard.

The longest essay in the volume is “Iona” in which the narrative voice of Fiona alternates with that of Sharp in chronicling stories and legends associated with the island (pp. 91-252). In a letter to Frank Rinder the previous December (Chapter 19, Volume 2), Sharp said he would like him to read the opening pages of “Iona,” for they contain a very deep and potent spiritual faith and hope, that has been with me ever since, as there told, as child of seven, old Seumas Macleod (who taught me so much — was indeed the father of Fiona) took me on his knees one sundown on the island of Eigg, and made me pray to “Her.” I have never written anything so spiritually autobiographical. Strange as it may seem it is almost all literal reproduction of actuality with only some dates and names altered.

Chapter Twenty 19

In the opening pages of “Iona”, Sharp as Fiona said she will speak “as befalls her pen” of the multiple meanings of Iona, and she will recount legends and remembrances of her own and others. She will describe “hidden meanings and beauty and strangeness surviving in dreams and imaginations, rather than facts and figures that others could adduce more deftly and with more will.” After a hundred and sixtyone Iona pages in the first edition of The Divine Adventure, Sharp/Fiona summarized the history of the island:

To this small, black-brown tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hundreds of years, have come. Solitary, these; not only because the pilgrim to the Fount of Eternal Youth must fare hither alone, and at dawn, so as to touch the healing water the moment the first sunray quickens it — but solitary, also, because those who go in quest of this Fountain of Youth are the dreamers and the Children of Dreams, and those are not many, and few come now to this lonely place. Yet, an Isle of Dreams Iona is, indeed. Here the last sun-worshippers bowed before the Rising of God; here Columba and his hymning priests labored and brooded; and here Oran or his kin dreamed beneath the monkish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here, too, the eyes of Fionn and Oisin, and of many another of the heroic men and women of the Fianna, may have lingered; here the Pict and the Celt bowed beneath the yoke of the Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams, or rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, as a heritage to the stricken; here for century after century, the Gael has lived, suffered, joyed, dreamed his impossible, beautiful dream; as here now, he still lives, still suffers patiently, still dreams, and through all and over all broods upon the incalculable mysteries.

The quotation illustrates the power of the essay which is the most lasting and influential piece of Sharp’s writings. Few may have come to Iona when it first appeared, but many, motivated by this essay, began to visit the island. Nowadays, hundreds visit this special place during the summer months, and many purchase booklets containing this essay in the island’s shops.

The section of The Divine Adventure called “By Sundown Shores” (pp. 255-308) contains five short essays and a longer piece entitled “Celtic” which also appeared in the May issue of The Contemporary Review. “Celtic” exemplifies what Sharp referred to as the merger of his masculine and feminine voices better than many of the volume’s essays. One hears in it the voice of Fiona Macleod, but that of the practical literary and cultural critic William Sharp predominates. It is as though

Fig. 1. Benedictine Abbey on Iona, Inner Hebrides, constructed in 1203 AD on the site of the Celtic Church which St. Columbo built after he settled on

Iona in 563 AD and began to establish Christianity in Scotland. Photograph by PaulT (Gunther Tschuch) (2019), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https: //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:lona_07.jpg two separate persons were speaking, both under the control of a single consciousness. Early on we hear Fiona saying the Celtic Movement was not “as so often confusedly stated an arbitrary effort to reconstruct the past,” but an “effort to discover the past.” As “one imputed to this movement,” she sought “in nature and in life, and in the swimming thought of timeless imagination, for the kind of beauty that the old Celtic poets discovered and uttered.” Those poets had no monopoly on artistic beauty. No beauty of art excels “that bequeathed to us by Greece,” but artists must seek and express their ideals through their own tradition. Fiona placed herself firmly in the Celtic camp, the camp of her heritage: “There is one beauty that has to me the light of home upon it; there is one beauty from which, above all others now, I hope for a new revelation; there is a love, there is a passion, there is a romance, which to me calls more suddenly and searchingly than any other ancient love or ancient passion or ancient romance.”

Chapter Twenty 21 & St Kilda

Tiree ls

Inner Hebrides

( | (_] outer Hebrides

Other parts of Scotland

Fig. 2. Map of the Inner and Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Iona is located in the

Inner Hebrides, just off the Isle of Mull. Map by Kelisi (2007), Wikimedia,

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/File:Hebridesmap. png#/media/File:Hebridesmap.png

After placing Fiona with her heightened rhetoric firmly among the Celts, Sharp reverted to the plainer language of the literary critic. Still writing as Fiona, he began to sound like the critic William Sharp. Although not a great believer in “movements” or “renascences,” he understood the

“Celtic Movement” as “the natural outcome, the natural expression of a freshly inspired spiritual and artistic energy.” Its source was “a mythology and a literature, and a vast and wonderful legendary folklore [...] in great part hidden behind veils of an all but forgotten tongue and of a system of life and customs, ideals and thought that no longer obtains.” Then, veering toward dangerous territory, he said he was unable to see the Celtic movement as having “sustenance in elements of revolt.” If a movement is to have any force, “it will not destroy itself in forlorn hopes, but will fall into line, and so achieve where alone the desired success can be achieved.” He took his examples from the realm of art, but “revolt” and “falling into line” opened the door to politics.

Having placed Fiona, and by extension himself, in the “Celtic Movement,” he then placed both figures squarely in the tradition of English literature. The term Celtic writer “must denote an Irish or Scottish Gael, a Cymric or Breton Celt, who writes in the language of his race.” Those who write in English, however, are English writers “who in person happen to be an Irish Gael, or Highland, or Welsh.” He was willing to be designated

Celtic only if the word signifies an English writer who by birth, inheritance, and temperament has an outlook not distinctively English, with some memories and traditions and ideals not shared in by one’s countrymen of the South, with a racial instinct that informs what one writes, and, for the rest, a common heritage.

The paragraph that stands out among the others in the essay turns overtly from literature to the issue of national identity:

Above all else it is time that a prevalent pseudo-nationalism should be dissuaded. Iam proud to bea Highlander, but I would not side with those who would “set the heather on fire.” If I were Irish, I would be proud, but I would not lower my pride by marrying it to a ceaseless ill-will, an irreconcilable hate, for there can be a nobler pride in unvanquished acquiescence than in revolt. I would be proud if I were Welsh, but I would not refuse to learn English, or to mix with English as equals. And proud as I might be to be Highland or Scottish or Irish or Welsh or English, I would be more proud to be British — for, there at last, we have a bond to unite us all, and to give us space for every ideal, whether communal or individual, whether national or spiritual.

Those carefully chosen words placed all Celtic people in the British Isles, including Ireland, under the British umbrella.

Chapter Twenty 23

Sharp knew that AE (George William Russell) and Yeats were intent on establishing Ireland as an independent country free of the English yoke. His argument for unity was, therefore, a direct attempt to discourage them from advocating separation from the British Empire to which he remained loyal throughout his life. Though he knew his views would not sit well with them or with other Irish writers advocating independence, Sharp hoped to soften their attitudes, to dissuade them from overt revolutionary activities, and above all to maintain his own position in a Celtic Literary Movement that transcended nationalisms. He underestimated the depth of AE’s feelings, the fire underlying his rhetoric, and the strength of the Irish independence movement.

Such is the background of a June 15 Fiona Macleod letter to George Russell. He had written to put her on notice that he intended to write a review of The Divine Adventure that took issue with her “Celtic” essay. In response, Fiona expressed her regret that AE rejected her effort to “save our Gaelic remnant from extinction.” She hoped he would give up “the transitory while inevitable logic of human sorrow and revolt” and adopt “the immortal and inevitable logic of the Spirit.” That hope failed to dissuade AE.